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BGonline.org Forums
"If it (the clock) ain't broke, don't fix it"
Posted By: Daniel Murphy In Response To: "If it (the clock) ain't broke, don't fix it" (Paul Baraz)
Date: Tuesday, 30 April 2013, at 3:59 p.m.
Well of course anyone "can play" with no delay. Personally, I had no problem with, for example, (5 minutes times match length) + 10 minutes time control. But during the years when that time control was used, there were many instances of players timing out, there were some instances of players adopting late match strategies which would otherwise be inferior, in order to take advantage of the other player's time shortage, and there were instances, most notably at one of the Czech Opens, of adopting otherwise inferior strategies to take advantage of the method of awarding penalty points to the opponent of the time-defaulting player.
While you may think none of this was a problem, the general feeling among players was that the purpose of clocking backgammon matches should be to ensure that tournament schedules progressed smoothly, and that time controls should not otherwise be a factor to the extent that they encouraged the adoption of normally suboptimal play in an attempt to "play the clock," or resulted in inferior play because there was not enough time to play well, as can happen in matches with very many games or with many unusually complex or long games. At the same time, while players wanted all matches to be completed on schedule, and generally had no problem with the idea of the unusually slow player losing a match (or losing penalty points) for timing out, most players did not want matches decided by running out of time, in those cases where the reason was not slow play but unusually long or complex matches.
The new time control, with a lesser number of minutes per match length, but with a delay, was intended to answer all the objections to the former time control. And I think it's worked rather well. I might note also that since the new time control seems to be accepted now as providing enough time for a superior level of play no matter how particular games happen to go, the general objection to losing as a result of time expiration has disappeared; with the delay control, you lose when your time expires, and that now seems to be acceptable to most players.
I'm not sure how your experience with clocks in chess is intended to bolster your argument about backgammon time controls, but I might ask that you give a bit more consideration to the opinions expressed here from those who don't agree with you, since many of them have far more experience with time controls in backgammon (with both the old and the new methods) than you have.
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